On The Books: Jim Crow Law Classifications in North Carolina Session Laws, 1866–1967

On the Books is a labeled training set from a collections-as-data project at UNC Chapel Hill Libraries. It contains expert-labeled chapter/section pairs from North Carolina session laws passed between 1866 and 1967, identifying them as Jim Crow laws or not. The dataset was created by author biglam and last updated on Hugging Face in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Train a binary classifier to identify discriminatory legal language based on expert-provided labels.
• Analyze the prevalence and evolution of Jim Crow legislation over time based on the labeled session laws.
• Benchmark natural language processing models on a specialized domain of historical legal text.
• Support digital humanities research on the legal foundations of segregation in the United States.

Strengths

• Expert-labeled data from a university library project provides high-quality annotations.
• Covers a specific and significant historical period from 1866 to 1967.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.

Provenance

Source

UNC Chapel Hill Libraries collections-as-data project.

Collection Method

Machine learning was used to identify laws, with labels applied by experts.

Time Range

1866–1967

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-30 13:28:37; freshness should be verified.

Geography

North Carolina, United States